Is Data Replacing Gold in Value?

With big data comes big responsibilities. If there was an industrial revolution in today’s world, it would be triggered by data. That said, a major part of the world’s population is still unaware that true power lies in the possession of information. Whether we like it or not, the real world is transforming into a digital facade more and more each day. Human dependency on machines is also growing exponentially. A human day is not complete presently without the usage of various kinds of gadgets and the apps. And what do machines feed on? Data! Google is filled with search results arguing that “data is the new gold.” With the rise of big data in the business world, it just might be right.

“We are seeing a continuous shift, when we will see more and more groups who think it is acceptable to provide data, as long as they receive something in return that is perceived as valuable,” says Frederik Bergström Principal Consultant, Tieto.

Data is everywhere, it takes proper verification to get value from it. One man’s unnecessary data is another man’s precious information. Business organizations all over America have benefited and continued on that quest with the emergence of big data. Big data has made it easy for businesses to locate and profile the right prospects relevant to the business. It helps in the prediction process of marketing strategies; it provides the right tools for customer analytics. With access to relevant and proper data, sales pipeline is bound to increase.

Advantages and Consequences

With all the advantages big data provides to businesses, it simultaneously presents a high risk to general public’s private affairs. This increase and the new perception of data’s value makes it vulnerable to criminal activities. If Google owners turn evil, they will have enough data to manipulate the whole world. The proper strategies aided by the use of big data in customer profiling gives us a community of satisfied consumers. However, a thin blue line exists between satisfaction and unwanted exposure. All the data we feed to advanced gizmos give machines and manufacturers the ability to predict our every move. Our clicks, likes, and shares on social media paint quite the picture of our general choices. People are careful enough to not give out sensitive information like credit card numbers online. Because of our more than regular involvements in the online world, it’s impossible not to leave our digital footprint.

Preservation and Nurturing

Now that we have established that data is a commodity valuable enough to be compared with gold, it’s important to make sure that it’s not misused. It’s the general public’s fundamental right to know how and when their personal information is being used. But big data is a jumble of data sets and there might still be other benefits or even potential threats related to it that we have not have considered yet.

The preservation of such data is a tricky business. There are all sorts of data afloat in the cyberspace from personal music preferences to classified financial transactions. Various companies have their own general policy about how they are using the data provided by their customers. But some trails of data exhaust are impossible to contain in a secure manner. An international standard of policy should be drawn to classify the data according to its importance. It is possible that a digital vault used to contain the data with access to limited, relevant and responsible persons would be a good idea.

Shaping the bright future or an imminent chaos.

All of us at some point have imagined a future with floating cities and vehicles fueled by Dolphin song. A land where only logic matters and the cab services go to Mars and beyond. We are already so close to driverless cars and drones – our dreams just might come true. But there’s also a dark side of the future that not only moviemakers, but any normal Joe dwell upon.

It is very much possible that while teaching machines to form their own logic and reasoning capacity, the process might give birth to a digital conscience. The hardware with its original thoughts may not need any human involvement at all – and there isn’t a fixed theory about where would we go from there. If robots were to comprehend human emotions, there’s a possibility that they could adopt evil into their chips and motherboards. There’s no need to even get that imaginative – the misuse of the data can easily put the wrong people in positions of authority. Humans already have an evil side. The risk of unwanted exposure could force people to perform sickly acts.

Conclusion

The fact still stands that humans have invented their way to this advanced technological world from the Stone Age. Imminent chaos shall be averted by the same intelligence that brought us to today’s future. It is inevitable that society will run into confrontations, but we always come on top of them one way or another.

We are the only living beings (to our knowledge) that have observed the literal ruling of the “iron fists”, industrial evolution and our whole world compressed into cellphones. Progress has always been our product. We evolved from the concept of power defined by the possession of a big rock to the possession of information. Possibilities of all kinds of futures are always intact, but it’s a long time before humanity will perish. We are creatures that rely on pure survival instinct – we will make the best of everything. The value of objects are always fluctuating. As data has almost come to replace gold in value, something else is bound to show up to de-value data.